


The Dust Between His Fingerprints

by InkedConstellations



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Blood, Death, Fighting, Gen, Kanda Wonders Why he Doesn't Feel Anything, Oops, Random & Short, Tags Are Hard, That's Cheesy Nevermind, The Ultimate Battle Is Always With Yourself, There's Some Feels For Ya, This Is Actually Longer Than I Expected, poor baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-24 06:37:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7497981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkedConstellations/pseuds/InkedConstellations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been a while since these sort of scenes affected him. Even when he was younger, he had never flinched when it came to pain, whether his or someone else's.<br/>It wasn't that he didn't hurt, it just didn't matter as much anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dust Between His Fingerprints

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:**  
>  desensitize (v.): to make someone or something less sensitive or nonreactive to stimulation; to make emotionally insensitive or callous, specifically to extinguish an emotional response to stimuli

There was blood on the ground, on his boots. It had seeped into his clothing, and even if the stains couldn't show against the black fabric, he knew the scent would linger, even after he scrubbed the rusty red flakes out of his hair and from between his fingers. In war, death was unavoidable. Kanda had been responsible for his fair share, had trained until his shoulders ached so that his Mugen would swing faster, cut sharper, than any other sword in existence, Innocence or no. Death was his bread and butter. It didn't bother him anymore, it had been so long since he was affected by a battle scene that part of Kanda often wondered if there was something wrong with him, something missing in his brain that kept him from feeling disgust or sick to his stomach. Fear was now a foreign concept. Nothing that existed out here could be even half as terrible as what lived inside the Order. Even pain had been taken from him.

He still felt it, of course, whenever he was cut by an akuma's claws or tossed against a wall and felt the bones of his chest splinter, pierce his lungs and keep him from breathing until it felt like he was drowning in himself. But the Om tattoo on his chest had taken away the meaning of that pain. When he was fully healed just a few hours, or even a few minutes, later, it didn't seem to matter whether he was injured or not. When he was a child, well, he had never truly been a child. When he was younger, he hadn't flinched at the pain he or anyone else felt, but at that time it had been more an act of stubborn refusal to accept anything the Order did to him. He would not give in. He would not let the bastards see him cry. He would be strong and he would reject the Innocence as any times as it took for them to shove their ideology up their asses because defiance was in his blood, had always been written on his tongue so when he spoke, it was all that poured out.

But was it really written in his blood when Kanda had bled so many times, there must be nothing left of his original self? When you could die and come back, death lost all meaning. And if fighting the Order didn't get him anywhere, he might as well fight the Earl at the same time. Two worthless, never-ending battles, that he couldn't quite bring himself to hate with the same fervor he'd possessed in the beginning.

It wasn't that he didn't hurt, it just didn't matter as much anymore.

And maybe that was his problem, Kanda reasoned. He had grown used to everything. Pain, fighting, blood, death, killing. After a while, it all sort of blended together into one grey blob, so mushy that he couldn't tell which was which, and so treated the whole package with apathy. He threw it away. Kanda didn't need things like fear or friendship, they got in his way. So he buried them the way a normal child might bury their pet in the backyard, when it stopped breathing and the parents had to carefully explain that no, their beloved pet was not going to wake up in the morning. Kanda didn't even mark the spot, so he might come back one day if he found he needed those emotions again. Kanda had never expected to need them, even before he unknowingly covered them with earth, so why should he prepare for the return of something he wasn't even aware he had left behind in the first place?

When there was blood in his hair, dried into the folds of his jacket and rusting along the edge of his sword, when the stench of sadness and rotting bodies filled his nose, the cackling laughter of a demon ringing in his ears, Kanda didn't need to feel anything at all. He just needed to move, to slash, to stab, to twist, to kill, to live, in that order of importance.

When the fighting was over, then Kanda would have time to let out a slow breath and release the tension hiding in his shoulders. Only then would he carefully wipe the blade of his Innocence drenched sword until the blade gleamed silver, strip his jacket to scrub the blood clear until only the faintest scent of it remained. Only then would he lower himself into the bath and watch the water swirl into rusty red, and try to remember who it had originally belonged to, usually failing.

Perhaps there was something wrong with him, that he was so nonchalant about this war, while his fellow exorcists gave everything they had to fighting. He had less to give than them, and it was like the world wouldn't accept it. The universe wouldn't even let him die for the cause he had been born to.

And he was just so tired of feeling it.


End file.
